About the Book

Race Women Internationalists explores how a group of Caribbean and African American women in the early and mid-twentieth century traveled the world to fight colonialism, fascism, sexism, and racism. Based on newspaper articles, speeches, and creative fiction and adopting a comparative perspective, the book brings together the entangled lives of three notable but overlooked women: American Eslanda Robeson, Martinican Paulette Nardal, and Jamaican Una Marson. It explores how, between the 1920s and the 1960s, the trio participated in global freedom struggles by traveling; building networks in feminist, student, black-led, anticolonial, and antifascist organizations; and forging alliances with key leaders. This made them race women internationalists—figures who engaged with a variety of interconnected internationalisms to challenge various forms of inequality facing people of African descent across the diaspora and the continent.

In recognition of International Women’s Day, we celebrate the economic, social, and political accomplishments of women worldwide. From the #metoo movement to the protection of reproductive health to the tireless work of …

About the Author

Imaobong D. Umoren is Assistant Professor of International History of Gender at the London School of Economics.

Reviews

Historians such as Erik S. McDuffie, Keisha N. Blain, Ula Y. Taylor, Gerald Horne, Carole Boyce Davies, and Dayo F. Gore have contributed to a burgeoning body of work that identifies Black women as crusaders and theoreticians.... These scholars have expanded our understanding of the ideological basis for a transnational Black freedom fighting praxis. With Race Women Internationalists, Umoren joins the fold. Her text answers Brittney Cooper’s clarion call to take seriously the ideas set forth by Black women by looking for their thinking in unexpected places. The text’s comparative perspective, chronological breadth, and depth of analysis is ambitious, a scholarly project befitting the women it follows.—Black Perspectives

"Umoren’s diligent research and exposition of various meetings, organisations and influencers provide ample points from which to begin. . . . readers will leave Race Women Internationalists with a great deal more knowledge about Marson, Nardal and Robeson, as well as agreeing with Umoren’s foundational claim that race women internationalists warrant greater inclusion in the narratives historians will tell about anti-colonialism, feminism, socialism and Pan-Africanism in the years to come."—LSE Review of Books

"The group biography format...allows Umoren to stress the heterogeneity of commitments that motivated Nardel, Marson, and Robeson’s activism. In addition, Umoren’s work offers an important corrective to disciplinary boundaries that would cordon off the myriad of cultural and political practices these activist-intellectuals engaged in. . . . [and] sets the foundation for future scholarship on the contributions of black feminist intellectuals to the world stage in the space between."—The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945

"This is an incredibly well-researched text. Pulling from governmental papers, personal papers, activist and mainstream publications and artistic writings from five countries, the author manages to give each of her subjects a distinct voice."—Journal of Social History

"With Race Women Internationalists, Imaobong D. Umoren has given us a work of great originality, insight, and brilliance. This is a model of meticulous transnational scholarship that focuses not on a singular individual, but on a network of three committed, cosmopolitan intellectuals/activists—Eslanda Robeson, Paulette Nardal, and Una Marson—who together represent an even larger group of women who complicate received notions of black thought and activism. In so doing, Umoren highlights categories of analysis including travel, writing, and friendship, which enrich our understanding of these women and will certainly enhance future studies as well."—Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II

"Race Women Internationalists is fresh, innovative, and timely in its ambition and approach. Imaobong D. Umoren pioneers a model that blends the biographical, political, intellectual, and cultural. Black international studies will be the book’s great beneficiary."—Barbara D. Savage, Segal Professor of American Social Thought, Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania

“Race Women Internationalists is a fascinating work that deepens our understanding of how Una Marson, Paulette Nardal, and Eslanda Robeson contributed to and shaped the various movements with which they engaged. Imaobong D. Umoren reveals the full extent of Robeson's work with the United Nations, Nardal’s networks with the women’s assembly, and Marson’s time in the United States during the turmoil of the Second Reconstruction.”—Dawn-Marie Gibson, author of The Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, and the Men Who Follow Him"Race Women Internationalists makes an important contribution to our understanding of black women as intellectuals and knowledge producers in the twentieth century. Focusing on the lives of exceptional women long overshadowed by the men they helped, Imaobong D. Umoren builds on important work by Jeanne Theoharis, Brittney C. Cooper, and Keisha Blain, which shows us how, and why, brilliant women are often hidden in plain sight."—Kate Dossett, author of Bridging Race Divides: Black Nationalism, Feminism, and Integration in the United States, 1896–1935